Using an Italian Diachronic Corpus to Investigate the "Core" Patterns of the Language of Science

Abstract

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, to help in establishing the true extent of the influence of scientific English on its Italian counterpart, especially at the level of the meaning-making practices of the Italian scientific community. Second, to provide a small contribution to the hypothesis of “core” patterns in scientific language across different languages following Halliday (1993). To achieve both aims, the linguistic evolution of a specialist subject field (medicine) which has been particularly influenced by English has been monitored over a 60-year time span (1939-2000) by investigating a small corpus, mainly on the topic of seborrhea and acne, consisting of original texts in Italian taken from textbooks on dermatology aimed at university students. The specific patterns of scientific language which are being monitored for measuring variation over time are mainly by-products of “grammatical metaphor”, which Halliday and Martin (1993) see as the most characteristic feature of the written “discourse for doing experimental science” (nominalization, choices for Theme and New, simple structure of clauses and sentences, etc.).